Mira Schendel exhibition at Tate Modern (Sep 25 – Jan 19, 2014) is a major retrospective of one of the most significant and influential Brazilian artists of the 20th century, Mira Schendel, who reinvented European Modernism in Brazil. The show features more than 250 paintings, drawings and sculptures, from her early paintings during the 1950s to her last series in 1987.

Schendel was born in Zurich in 1919 to parents of Jewish heritage, but grew up in Italy as a Catholic, and this experience contributed to her profoundly spiritual and philosophical approach to her art making. In 1938, she was stripped of her Italian nationality and forced to leave university when anti-Semitic laws were introduced in Italy. After fleeing to Yugosalvia and then Brazil in 1949, she began her career as an artist. She joined an intellectual circle and there explored ideas concerning aesthetics and philosophy. She also worked as a graphic designer, producing book covers, posters and illustrations to make a living at her early career.

Schendel was a prolific and complex artist. Largely self taught, she drew inspiration for her still-lifes, interiors and asymmetrical, architectonic compositions from artists such as Giorgio Morandi, Giorgio de Chirico and Paul Klee. Her works contain elements of Lettrism, Color Field painting, Minimalism and early Conceptual art, but she was never associated with a single movement while having contributed to the Concrete art and Neo-concre art movements that stormed the Brazilian avant-garde. In life, Schendel was an keen reader and continued correspondence with poets, philosophers and theologians throughout Brazil and Europe, and as a result, physical, cultural and linguistic displacement are key themes in her work, together with issues of religion and philosophy. She was also influenced by Far Eastern cosmovision and created works inspired by Chinese painting.

Schendel’s work, characterized by such as combining word and image, using spiral motifs which signify an image and an investigation of space and time, or applying on semi-transparent rice papers, and is rather quiet and delicate yet profound. It is surprising that she is little known outside Brazil!